July 2013: Best of Search Engine Journal

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Business Pages on Facebook have their own set of guidelines which you can read here, yet I continually see countless Facebook Pages posting illegal images, running illegal contests or just doing things that aren’t welcomed by Facebook. So what happens when users break Facebook law? Pages can be shut down. It doesn’t happen all that often, as far as we know, but it is a possibility and potentially a huge hassle.

This post goes into 5 different things you shouldn’t be doing on Facebook!

A month after Penguin 2.0 was released, the dust is settling and most people are eager to know: What exactly is Penguin 2.0 filtering? How does Penguin 2.0 differ from Penguin 1.0? What can I do to recover my site and to protect my site from getting hit in the future? Should I try to recover, or start over with a fresh domain?

This post goes into all the different Penguin updates and how to get you back on track!

Many website owners use Excel on a daily basis. They might keep a list of backlinks they want to track, or use it to track keyword rankings. True SEO professionals know how to use Excel to maximize the value of their SEO strategy, manipulating the data in ways that shed new insights into their campaign. This article will outline my favorite tricks for doing so. A couple years ago, Ann Smarty wrote an excellent piece on using Excel for SEO, but I figured it was time for a refresher based on the many changes the industry has gone through since then.

I think this is a high time for local business to radically increase their local marketing strategies to maximize from this update. This guide lists the practical activities that need to be performed if you want to be sure that your business is found in the search results in this post-penguin world. I hope these takeaways are something you can immediately put into action for your own business websites.

When the phrase first appeared, SEO web design intended little more than stuffing your great 90’s website with whatever terms you had been optimizing for, getting listed on famous directories, and populating your meta data for the search engines to evaluate. Search engine marketing and SEO optimization were fundamentally as traditional as the search engines themselves, before the 1st algo has been written to point keyword stuffing, you just typed your key phrase more times compared to anyone else to get the top place in Yahoo.

The video of his which really inspired me was his TED talk on 30 day challenges where Matt used these to change his life for the better including cutting out sugar (must have been around the time of a really nasty update!), cycling and even climbing a mountain. You can see the video here and Matt has also got a section on his blog where he has covered his own challenges.

This post will go into tips and tricks to hack your career and life with simple changes! Much like Matt Cutts.

In-house SEO teams and individuals are in a unique position – they’re able to focus on a single industry and company, whereas SEO agencies and freelancers face the task of executing campaigns for multiple clients in a variety of industries.

If you’re an in-house SEO professional, you’re probably already being bombarded with questions and demands for solutions to problems. But what tactics do you have at your disposal? What tools are in your toolbox?

This article presents the top 10 tactics for in-house SEO professionals; basically, what I would do if I was an in-house SEO manager.

Local SEO—or LSEO as I like to call it—is evolving quickly. For instance, Google recently began the process of integrating its old local directory product Google Places into Google+ Local. In this post Kris goes into how to get top local results.

Things have been changing for quite some time in the SEO world. Hence, new trends have finally surfaced. Things that didn’t matter a few years ago are now of vital importance and companies are constantly making use of them to get more traffic. Here are a few such emerging trends in the SEO world.

10 blue links. This is how search engines currently answer questions — over a billion times each day. But what if instead of seeing 10 results, you only saw one? Sounds crazy, I know. But search is evolving and this could be its future. And it could be here a lot sooner than you think. Let’s take a look at why.

In the wake of a fourth Penguin installment, utilizing new “Penguin 2.0” technology, around 2.3% of all English search queries will have been affected. The Penguin update is designed to combat manipulative (spammy) link building practices, and punish those who’ve indulged in the darker side of link building by throwing them down the rankings. This includes using automated link building services and submission software.

Hopefully, this article will give you an overview of how to tell if you’re affected by Penguin and what to do about it!

It’s a well-known fact that the SEO world keeps changing and updating in a rapid pace and things which seem to be set in stone can in fact turn obsolete in a matter of a few year or even months. When MajesticSEO released their new flow metrics about a year ago, it was time for the good old Page rank to step aside and make way for a better and more accurate indication for a site’s authority.

Before I start speaking about the reason for this, I’ll start with a short overview on these metrics for those of you who have been living in a cave for the past year, or are simply new to SEO.

Thanks Loren, for your very informative article on Yahoo Answers. It has been on my ‘to explore’ list for some time. Your insights have certainly given some practical direction about how to leverage this avenue for social marketing. Definitely worth exploring.Reply